1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to wireless communication methods and systems and, more particularly, to network multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems and methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network MIMO (netMIMO) is a family of techniques that has the potential to enhance the capacity of wireless systems via tight coordination between access points (APs), thus enabling them to serve multiple users concurrently. Numerous existing schemes, traditionally used in multi-user MIMO systems, have been applied to establish netMIMO by integrating distributed APs into one giant-MIMO. Several works have looked into the design of efficient multi-user MIMO (single cell and netMIMO multiple cells/links) transmission schemes in the physical layer that have been adopted in next generation standards, such as 802.11 ac and CoMP (Coordinated Multi-Point) in LTE (Long Term Evolution). There have also been several practical realizations of such MU-MIMO and netMIMO schemes in the networking community that showcase their real-world performance. Existing works have focused on the realization of the netMIMO scheme itself and hence only considered small scale topologies where channel state information is shared amongst all transmitters.